title: Priming thoughts about extravagance: implications for consumer decisions about luxury products.
abstract: If a semantic concept is accessible in memory, it can direct attention to the attributes of a target that exemplify this concept. When these attributes have both affective and utilitarian implications that are evaluatively opposite, the relative impact of these different implications depends on an individual's ability and motivation to expend the cognitive effort required to evaluate them. These assumptions were confirmed in six experiments on the impact of priming the concept of extravagance on attention to a product's luxury-related features and consequent reactions to it. Priming this concept decreased the choice of a luxury product if participants were both motivated and able to construe the utilitarian implications of the product's extravagance-related features. When participants were either distracted from deliberating on their choices or were asked to recommend a product to others, however, priming extravagance led them to base their judgments on the affective reactions that the features spontaneously elicited and consequently increased their choice of the product.
authors.affiliation: Department of Business Administration, Korea University.
authors.forename: Jongwon
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Park
authors.affiliation: SKK Graduate School of Business, Sungkyunkwan University.
authors.forename: Kyeongheui
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.affiliation: Department of Business Administration, Dongseo University, Sasang-Gu.
authors.forename: Junsik
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kwak
authors.affiliation: Department of Business Administration, Chinese University of Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Robert S
authors.initials: RS
authors.lastname: Wyer
mesh_terms: D000339:Affect; D001288:Attention; D003210:Concept Formation; D003657:Decision Making; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male